That afternoon we drove home and made Rebecca’s own chicken dinner from the handwritten recipe card in our hallway cabinet, and Hannah teased me mercilessly about my cooking, and I reminded her that the Navy trains its officers for tactical leadership, not for gourmet meals, and she told me the Navy ought to update its training, and threw a handful of chopped parsley into the pot, and the kitchen was warm and loud and full.

Our house no longer felt like a place waiting for some new person to arrive and finally make it a real family.

That, in the end, was the quiet correction at the heart of the whole story, the thing I had gotten backward for years without knowing it.

I had spent so long thinking of our family as incomplete, as a thing with a piece missing, a two-person household waiting for a third to arrive and finally make it whole.

I had carried that sense of deficiency into everything, and it was precisely that sense of deficiency that had made me vulnerable, because a man who believes his family is incomplete will overlook a great deal in the person who promises to complete it.